When I wrote about the Bozeman UU Fellowship yesterday, there was one story I left out because I couldn't remember the woman's name. She was quite old but a fierce activist. Her dining room table was spread with materials and the phone connection cord (this was before cell phones) went from the wall to hanging from the chandelier over the table to the woman's seat, action central. Her daughter had died, but her son-in-law stepped into the space and bought a duplex so he could live close but not too close. They didn't cut a door between the two sides, but he took care of her. Was it Loretta Edsall? Well-known to her political representatives since she kept up a wave of notes and phone calls.
On the night of the Water Gathering Ceremony, she forgot her jar of water on that tumbled table. Never caught off balance, she simply spoke -- very eloquently -- about the lack of water. She told us about a time of drought when she was a child growing up on a dry land farm, like the ones around Valier. Her pony died of thirst. Tears were the water.
Almost everything has another side, often lethal and dark. We tend to think of the world in binaries that become "good" versus "bad" because our central purpose as individuals, as a species, and as living embodiments of the earth is to survive. But so many variations do NOT survive. We see it as adversarial.
Working with molds and castings so much, I became very conscious of a different way that is the shape -- one side the figure and the other side the material that pressed that shape but now stood empty, a negative. Ready to make a new positive. A molecule-thickness non-skin exists where the two versions butt up against each other. It's a reciprocity, a relationship tighter than a knife edge. It is the way an individual lives in an environment where that boundary is called "skin".
Related is the spectrum which extends from one "thing" to its opposite along a span of interactions instead of making them fight each other as mutually exclusive opposites. Mike Burgwin, my boss at Animal Control and an old cop, used to say that law enforcement can never wipe out crime and disaster but that we should always be thinking and performing whatever will move the community away from pain and loss end closer to security. Right now the army is doing that better in foreign countries than we are as law enforcement in our cities here at home. The cops have become the reverse of the criminals, mirrors. And a born mafia man is our President.
Every time I consider some arcane existential term, often theological, as the topic for a blog and google it to see what's out there, what I get is the name of a rock band of some kind. But they haven't gotten to "Apophatic theology" yet. It's a little surprising that with all the talk of void and abyss and end-time, they haven't found it. The opposite is kataphatic, the positive way, which is what we call our wind, the one that eats snow.
The via negativa is sort of like making a sculpture with no mold, as figures were made when the main media was marble instead of cast bronze. That's the stereotype where a man in a smock uses hammer and chisel to carve away the stone. The story is about releasing the portrait that was always in there, hidden in the mass. So "this" bit is not God and "that" is not God and ultimately you get to the last blow and the whole remaining shard shatters -- there is no God in there.
Of course, that's working with the given that "God" is a "thing" as they say today. People shift it to a nicer concept like "love" or "The Force." They look for the "Word" that is written. But I want to think deeper than "things." Things and words are from the conscious mind but I'm looking for the unconscious, the fabric of existence, the symphony that IS us for a while. No, not just us, because even we think we ARE only consciousness. But our consciousness is capable of thinking of "more" than anything we conceive of and even can think of the concept of nothingness, though it's nothing. But you have to "be" in order to think of non-being, so thinking always structures the thought and that means it is assuming something or how could it begin?
We don't give enough attention to simply "being" even though that's both the marble and the mold. But I, for one, am always conscious of how many people are not surviving, not "being" anymore. Survival is, or should be, the point of morality. But it assumes that virtue is defined by survival and sometimes it is not. Putting oneself in danger for a higher cause is virtuous. But who defines a higher cause? Is it protecting more people? Is it giving children higher priority? What requires it have to stay inside law and order? Why does no one take a bulldozer to the walls around the prisons where the immigrant children are being held? Benefactors and politicians have visited, but nothing has changed.
We have lost the configuration that defines community versus individual. Warring communities are destroying whole categories of individuals or trying to. If Loretta were still here, her phone and pen would be smoking.
The actual and present is overtaking my reflection on apophatic theology. Maybe I need to get away from the keyboard and simply "be" long enough to let come to light.
VIA NEGATIVA is a technical term for the negative way of theology, which refuses to identify God with any human concept or knowledge, for God transcends all that can be known of him. (Wikipedia)
VIA NEGATIVA is a technical term for the negative way of theology, which refuses to identify God with any human concept or knowledge, for God transcends all that can be known of him. (Encyclopedia.com)
APOPHATIC THEOLOGY, also known as negative theology, is a form of theological thinking and religious practice which attempts to approach God, the Divine, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God. (Wikipedia)
When the people destroying America go on television, they purport to know everything for sure, even as Trump trips into dementia. They are all afraid of the dark.
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